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The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. recently confirmed that it possesses the employee travel records that JunketSleuth has been seeking for nearly two years.

By complying – for the first time – with a very specific request we submitted under the federal Freedom of Information Act, the agency showed that it:

– Knows where to find the records.– Possessed them all along.– Can provide them in the exact format JunketSleuth specified.– Agrees that the documents and data are public records.

None of that seems to matter. The FDIC still refuses to release a full set of employee travel records.

The FDIC's repeated refusals to turn over the information – despite the fact that more than 30 other agencies have given JunketSleuth identical types of data and documents – demonstrate that federal officials still can violate the Freedom of Information Act with impunity.

The Freedom of Information Act allows public access to government records, and it's a law that many people – including President Obama – believe is vital to a free nation.

Hours after being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009, Obama released an executive memo making it clear that the Freedom of Information Act "should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails."

"For a long time, there's been too much secrecy in this city," Obama said, adding that his administration stood not "on the side of those who want to withhold information but those who seek to make it known."

Attorney General Eric Holder released his own memo, stating that "an agency should not withhold information simply because it may do so legally."

The FDIC's intransigence in turning over employee travel records is troubling, said Mark Caramanica, of The Reporter's Committee for the Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit organization that defend the First Amendment rights of journalists.

"This is core FOIA information – how you're managing taxpayer funds," said Caramanica, who is the group's freedom of information director.

The FDIC is the backbone of the nation's banking system. It insures individual deposits, regulates certain financial activities, takes control of failed institutions and liquidates their assets.

FDIC employees have been particularly busy since the financial industry collapsed in 2008. Over the past four years, the agency has been involved in the closing of more than 400 banks. Nearly every Friday night, FDIC employees are traveling somewhere in America, to help shut down failed banks and safeguard their assets.

JunketSleuth filed the first of several requests with the FDIC in October 2009, seeking data and documents on employee travel – records that are clearly defined as public under federal law.

JunketSleuth filed the requests under FOIA, which allows public access to government records that do not fall under one of several exemptions. That list includes exemptions protecting personal privacy, national security, active law enforcement investigations and confidential business information.

With the exception of Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, frequent flyer numbers and other personal information, the vast majority of travel information requested by JunketSleuth is public.

More than 30 other agencies that got identically worded requests from JunketSleuth turned over their travel databases, which contain millions of records. Most also turned over other documents, including hotel bills, airline receipts and other documents related to travel by top agency officials and other government employees.

But the FDIC has repeatedly refused to provide any comprehensive information on travel by its employees. It has claimed, among other things, that it has no central database, that Junketsleuth's requests were too broad, and that even if the agency had the information, the public didn't have a right to see it.

"Based upon experience, records relating to travel by FDIC employees include personal information, such as home addresses, the disclosure of which would constitute an invasion of personal privacy," FDIC counsel Fredrick L. Fisch, wrote in a Nov. 10, 2009, letter.

Unlike other agencies, the FDIC did not offer to simply strip out the personal information and turn over the public information, including the identities of employees who took government-funded trips, the locations they visited, and the cost, dates and purpose of the travel.

JunketSleuth worked for months with an attorney from the Office of Governmental Information Services, which mediates disputes between federal agencies and people requesting public records under FOIA.

The attorney was able to help persuade a number of other agencies to provide JunketSleuth with electronic and paper travel records. But she was unable to get the FDIC to provide the exact same types of records.

After many months of repeated FDIC refusals, JunketSleuth tried another approach.

To get around the FDIC's complaint that our requests were too vague, we decided to seek information on a single trip by a single employee and ask only for copies of the receipts from that trip.

Then, if the agency turned over those records, we would ask for any electronic records – in other words, the FDIC's database entry – for that same trip.

We reasoned that if the FDIC granted that request, we could simply ask for the same information on every other traveler.

As our test case, we decided to use then-FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair's trip to San Diego in March of this year, for the Independent Community Bankers of America's national convention.

On May 10, we filed a new Freedom of Information Act request, for copies of receipts from that trip, including "hotel receipts, meal receipts, airline tickets, taxi receipts, audits, etc."

After nearly 18 months of rejecting broader requests, the FDIC complied with the documents covering Bair's trip. Those records show that Bair paid $1,039.40 to fly from Washington D.C. to San Diego, and that she spent $147.43 to stay one night at the San Diego Marriott Marquis & Marina.

With copies of receipts from Bair's trip in hand, JunketSleuth then asked for electronic records on the same trip. Two weeks later, the FDIC provided JunketSleuth a copy of the electronic record of the trip, which included fields of data recording virtually every type of information JunketSleuth had requested: The purpose of the trip, total cost, destination, class of travel, name of traveler and other details.

The response demonstrated that the FDIC did, in fact, have the very data that it claimed numerous times not to have. It also showed that the agency could locate, compile and release the information that it said it couldn't easily find and was not required to turn over.

So JunketSleuth took the next logical step. On Aug. 2, we filed two more FOIA requests (see here & here), one for copies of receipts for travel by top officials, and another for data for all employees.

Each request contained a copy of Bair's trip records and asked that the FDIC provide nothing more than the exact same records for the rest of the agency's travelers.

Surely, we reasoned, the FDIC couldn't refuse any longer. But that's exactly what the FDIC did.

On Aug. 18, in two separate letters signed by Supervisory Counsel Hugo A. Zia (see here & here), the agency responded to both requests. Although JunketSleuth's two requests involved vastly different types of information, the FDIC's responses were nearly identical, and were filled with cut-and-paste paragraphs from previous responses.

The FDIC continued to maintain that JunketSleuth did not adequately describe what it wanted and that, even if we had, it couldn't produce the data without an effort that would "unduly burden... FDIC's operations."

In regard to the electronic data, the FDIC also said that just because it produced data for one employee didn't mean that it could do the same for others.

In responding to our request on Bair's trip to San Diego, the FDIC had already produced a database with all of the field types that JunketSleuth had requested. Adding more records to an existing database clearly can be done with significantly less effort than creating an entirely new database, even one for a single record.

The FDIC continues to insist, however, that the data that JunketSleuth is seeking is too difficult and time-consuming to assemble.

"The information that you now are requesting is not readily available, and the potential scope of your request is enormous," the agency said in its most recent response.

But other agencies with many times the numbers of employees as the FDIC have compiled the same data for JunketSleuth with relatively little difficulty.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which was the first agency to provide travel data to JunketSleuth, has about 84,000 employees, compared to 8,400 for the FDIC.

The Department of Interior has nearly nine times the number of employees as FDIC, and it, too, provided us with electronic data and paper records.

Concerning receipts, the FDIC offered to produce "some" copies of receipts of travel by top officials, but maintained that JunketSleuth's request was "ambiguous."

JunketSleuth appealed all of the FDIC's previous rulings on our requests. All were rejected. We did not appeal the most recent ruling, since the agency does not appear inclined to reverse itself.

Federal agencies routinely violate FOIA, as they've done since the law was created decades ago. Still, few agencies have rejected requests identical to those that others have granted, especially when the government's own attorneys (in this case at OGIS) have worked with the agencies to secure access to the records.

Caramanica, of The Reporter's Committee, said JunketSleuth's problem with FDIC is indicative of a larger problem with FOIA, but added: "This seems to be a pretty extreme example."

JunketSleuth gave the FDIC specific examples of the records it sought, Caramanica said. And the information requested – where employees went, why they traveled, how much they spent and whether they flew first class – is clearly public, he said.

Although the FDIC got the Obama administrations memo on openness, the agency is not adhering to the principles, Caramanica said.

"The Obama Administration makes a lot of hay over... having a collaborative, open government environment, but when it comes down to reporters trying to get nuggets of information to write stories that the public would be interested in, we still see a lot of resistance.

"The transparent thing to do, if you're following Obama's memo, is to reach out to the requester rather than sending a denial letter."